Information technology (IT) service providers are quite often challenged to find ways to effectively manage and maintain very large-scale infrastructures. An example enterprise environment may have many thousands of devices and hundreds of installed software applications to support. The typical enterprise also uses many different types of central data processors, networking devices, operating systems, storage services, data backup solutions, cloud services, and other resources.
There is certainly a push to migrate to automated solutions for management of such a diverse environment. In some implementations point-to-point integration can be accomplished with Run Book Automation (RBA) solutions. But even coordination of automated solutions can become quite complex as that often involves integration of multiple products and services including provisioning engines, functional level products, and security concerns.
Disaster Recovery (DR) operations are for the most part a primarily manual operation. For highly virtualized environments and cloud-based applications, there are some available tools that leverage automation. But a large portion of enterprise IT is still not virtualized or placed in the cloud. For such environments, the only option is to manually codify recovery processes for each and every application and each and every data center scenario. That is typically a very labor intensive and time-consuming process.
Some process implementations leverage “task level” automation tools, freeing human operators to focus on coding the overall “orchestration”. One such tool is Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) Operations Orchestration (HPOO), which permits automation of enterprise-scale IT processes and solutions. But even a solution based on HPOO still requires a human programmer to write a set of procedures that determine the appropriate tasks and the correct sequence in which to execute them.